Richard Whitmire, a longtime education reporter, often focused his work on the idea that girls were being shortchanged in schools. “I had two daughters and I thought this was an outrage,” he said. “I wrote these articles uncritically, and it wasn’t long afterward that I realized it was a big mistake.” He found that boys — from his extended family, his local schools, and from national data — were falling behind in school. Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Educational System That’s Leaving Them Behind
Q. What are some of the usual explanations about why boys fall behind in schools?
A. The dominant one came from conservatives, who were the first to reveal and publicize that boys were in trouble. Christina Hoff Sommers’ book, The War Against Boys, was serialized in The Atlantic and had a huge following. She spent half of her book explaining why boys are in trouble – she was one of the first on the scene – and then the other half of the book she spent blaming feminism. It was a follow-up to a previous book she had written criticizing feminism. She was right about the boys, but feminists are pretty much blameless here, as far as my research goes.
This created an unusual political dynamic. Women’s advocacy groups stepped forward and defended themselves. Unfortunately, they defended themselves by saying boys aren’t having trouble. They might have just said, hey, we weren’t at fault. It was understandable that they wanted to defend themselves, but in doing it that way, they’ve helped create a political standoff, if you will, in this country. Studying the issue of boys is politically charged – you’re thought to be a conservative. But this is an international phenomenon in developed Western countries. And in other countries, where they haven’t had so much political turmoil, they’ve taken steps to see what’s going on.
Q. Do the experiences of other countries shed light on what’s happening here and why it’s happening?
A. This is happening in England, Australia, to a lesser extent New Zealand. Australia is where the gender gap is as steep as it is in the U.S. In Canada, they’re just beginning to discover the gap, and they don’t seem to have the political problems we’ve had confronting it. Australia is the only country that I know of that has had an official federal investigation into the causes. They’ve concluded the same thing I’ve concluded – that the world has gotten more verbal and boys haven’t. The reason for this happening is different in each country. But here, you can see that 20 years ago, the country’s governors met at the University of Virginia and launched what we know of today as the modern school reform movement. Its intent was to prepare more students to be ready to take on college work. The governors foresaw correctly that college would become the new high school – that nearly everyone would need post high school work. It was the right thing to do. But the currency of any college curriculum is verbal skill. It doesn’t matter what you’re studying. You have to be able to read and write quickly and clearly.
To prepare students for this, states pushed more sophisticated verbal skills requirements into the lowest grades. Through that 20 year period, you have kindergartners doing what second graders were doing. What the states didn’t foresee was that girls would adapt to this easily. And boys have not. I’m not a neurologist, so I won’t try to explain why, but parents or teachers can tell you that girls pick up verbal skills very quickly. When boys are asked to pick up these skills, it’s baffling, it’s confusing, it’s demoralizing, and they conclude that school is for girls. Boys look elsewhere for fulfillment, for positive experience. They find it in places like video games. And then video games get blamed, rap music gets blamed. There is a long list.
Q. Is the increasing emphasis on math and science education giving boys the advantage again?
A. No, because, take math for example. Twenty-five years ago, math was a list of calculations on a piece of paper. Now it’s word problems. And correctly so. Colleges and companies want people with real-world problem-solving abilities, which will always require verbal context, the ability to describe and solve a problem. Verbal questions are more difficult than the math problem itself. If you’re not a good and quick reader, you will be perplexed by the math problem as well. It really doesn’t matter, the emphasis on math and science today, because it has all become more verbal.
Q. You mentioned that the curriculum shifted to emphasize verbal skills 20 years ago. How is the first generation of boys who grew up under this change doing?
A. It’s hard to measure perfectly in time. As close as you can get are these surveys that the U.S. Department of Education takes of high school seniors. They ask them about their college aspirations – do you anticipate going to two year college, four year college, graduate school, that kind of thing. Roughly 20 years ago on this, boys and girls were tied. Boys were slightly ahead in aspiration. But since then – and you can see this as a line graph over the years – girls’ aspirations have skyrocketed, it’s a really steep climb. Boys haven’t flat-lined, exactly, but it’s nothing like what has happened with the girls. Something starts sapping boys of their academic aspirations. They don’t feel good about school.
Q. How does boys’ falling behind in education impact the workforce?
A. As I mentioned, the state governors wisely anticipated that college would become the new high school – for machine-shop jobs you need one or two years of college-level education, and police departments require at least two years. So the place to measure this is college. There we find that those earning associate degrees are 62% female. Those earning bachelor’s degrees are 57% female. That is who is entering the workforce. You are seeing more and more women going into the workforce, though that trend is not always obvious. They go in different directions, they have different interests. You’ll see Wall Street loaded with men and you’ll see that broadcast television, though they still have a male anchor up front, is all female behind the scenes. Women are the better educated, but they pursue different fields, and that does matter for the economy.
But I think the bigger impact, frankly, is the social impact. Pew Research Center a couple of weeks ago came out with their big report showing that there has been a startling change in families. Women are having to take over the chief breadwinner role, which is creating huge adjustments. Unmarried women face the option of what’s crudely dubbed marrying down, marrying someone who doesn’t have the same education level that they do. That is a big change.
Q. What is the impact of that change in family life?
A. The example here is in the African American community. Twice as many African American women as African American men earn bachelor’s degrees. The Washington Post had an article recently about African American women having to “date out,” is the term they used, that is, consider marrying non-black males because there just aren’t enough. In an urban area like Washington DC, there are three times as many educated black women as men. So how have college-educated black women reacted to this so-called marriage dilemma? If you look at the numbers, you’ll see a high rate of out-of-wedlock births and low marriage rates – because there’s nothing in it for them. Why would they get married? The incentives to do so are low. The question is, will white women do the same as black women? Will they marry someone who isn’t as educated? Perhaps they will, but we don’t know this yet. It has yet to play out.
Q. Have these trends led people to look and see where boys are falling behind and why?
A. No, as far as I can tell. The U.S. Department of Education has yet to launch one study into this. The major foundations that pursue educational goals also avoid it. And this isn’t provable, but, I attribute this to the original controversy, the claim that feminists are to blame for this. Any look at this issue turns into a food fight. No one wants to touch it, and yet it they don’t touch it, if President Obama and Education Secretary Duncan continue to avoid it, there is no way they’re going to meet their goal of regaining the top position in the world as far as having an educated workforce. The numbers they are using to measure the goal are OECD numbers, which count those who have two-year degrees. That’s where it’s currently 62 percent women.
I think what will have an impact is the so-called great recession, also dubbed the mancession. Nearly 80 percent of layoffs have been male. There is a bucket of cold water being dumped on men. A couple of weeks ago, Inside Higher Education published a piece – anecdotal but very thorough – on a boost in the number of men going to community college. At least at that level there has been an awakening. At the bachelor’s level it’s too soon to tell.
Q. How do we keep boys from following behind?
A. I’m a reporter, not a literacy expert or professional educator. I tend to look at what’s happening elsewhere. I go back to Australia. They released a report that came out about seven years ago, and to greatly oversimplify a 200-page report, the conclusion was, the world is getting verbal and boys aren’t. The Australian government designed some interventions that they thought would work with boys and tried them out on an experimental basis. They concluded which were most effective and then offered those to schools in the form of a grant opportunity. I went to an Australian school following one of the models, and it worked very well. It was a series of small adjustments that seemed to have a big impact and dealt with boys’ verbal and organizational skills. I’m not going to say that Austarlia solved the problem – because frankly not a lot of schools took the government up on its offer. But based on what I’ve seen, that’s the right way to go. It has to start with the federal government saying, we have a problem here. Right now, when we look at school accountability models, we only measure race and income level. They keep numbers by gender, but they are not required to make sure boys and girls are making the same progress, so they ignore it.
Q. Is there a role for same-sex education?
A. More than three years ago, the Bush administration gave a legal green light to public schools to experiment with single sex education. There has been a huge rush to do it. I think 550 schools now offer some kind of single sex program. But the U.S. Department of Education has offered no research into how to do this. It is astonishing. They just said, go ahead, you can do it, you’re on your own. It was one of these classic gold-rush moments – it was the new thing, and so everyone did it. I’m not convinced these programs are set up to succeed. In the book, I profile schools that do as well by boys as they do by girls, and only one was single sex. I’m not saying it’s bad or unhelpful, but you don’t have to have single-sex education. You just have to adjust the way you teach boys to read.
*Photo courtesy Dr John2005.
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